Legal Implications of Coal Workforce Reduction Strategies in China
Quan le Zou et al.
What the paper says
China’s coal sector is the largest contributor to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and a major cause of air pollution, which claims over 1 million lives annually. Long-term climate commitments include a target to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, which entails between a 60–90 percent reduction in coal use by mid-century. Of the many challenges associated with this transition, addressing the dislocation of coal and fossil fuel workers is perhaps the most challenging. While there are recognized efforts to achieve a “just transition” that works for fossil communities and workers, practices to date in China do not fully prioritize these groups. The closest analogue to what will need to be achieved is the supplyside restructuring of mostly state-owned coal and other heavy industries concentrated in 2016–2018 and continuing to this day. The coal sector has shed over 2 million jobs since its recent peak of 2013—and, in contrast to earlier state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms, did not result in widespread social unrest. Lessons were learned from earlier periods, and the increased institutionalization of labor contract law is a possible argument for the relatively smoother workforce reduction mandated by overcapacity reduction. In this brief commentary, we explore the workforce reduction strategies during this period and the legal basis for various practices adopted by SOEs.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.